


Knife Claim

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Getting Back Together, Married Couple, Missing Scene, Old Married Couple, Post-Canon, a super dense married gravitional field, also kind of just regular horny tbh, like an emotionally horny charcter study, minerology and mining slang 101
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 17:30:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19339225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: It's March, just past Winter and too cold still toreallycall it Spring, and Mr. Hades, he's working.Hades POV character study.





	Knife Claim

**Author's Note:**

> "Knife Claim":  
> A thin seam of gold dug or other precious ore dug from crevices in the rock with a knife.  
> - _California Notes_ , Charles Beebe Turrill, 1876
> 
> Thanks to @ehmazing, who dragged me down

**March 24.**

He’s got a cap, does Mr. Hades, makes a man invisible. Came down through the family, that cap, on his mother’s side, and what it does, is that sometimes, middle of March, when it feels it oughta still be Winter, but folks’ll call it Spring anyway, what it does is that Mr. Hades slips his fine black coat from his shoulders, and his shiny, beetle-back shoes from his feet, and locks up his bright silver watch and its fine platinum chain and what’s left of his cold, black heart and tugs on a pair of dusty work boots, and a rag coat, and pulls the old, flat, workman’s cap low over his brow and nobody recognizes him, not at all.

Invisible.

And you can’t build something out of nothing, there’s still enough brawn on the old man to lift a shovel, swing a pick. Still there, the shape of it, the ol’ heave-ho boys, in the slope of his shoulders. He has hard hands, Mr. Hades, hard hands still, still knows exactly how to throw his head back and drink with the boys. And there’s a use in that, to be sure, when the riots bubble up, like the riots always bubble up, but sometimes, it’s just past Winter, only  _ just _ past, ain’t  _ really _ Spring yet, not really, and a man just has to  _ do _ something. Anything. Lose himself in the work, on account of the work, the work’ll always be there. Always needs coke for the fires, ore for the foundries and clay for the molds and brick upon brick for the Wall, and there’s a peace in that. There’s a cold comfort in the counting, cold like water on a parched throat. Cold like iron.

It’s always cold in Hadestown.

It’s always cold, except when it’s not, the foundries and the fires, and shit, what else is a man supposed to do to keep warm at night? Nobody there to warm the bed, what’s a man supposed to do? Mr. Hades, he pulls his cap low, invisible, and he turns his sleeves up and up over the hard, pale stretch of his forearms, and he sets to work. Machinery breaks, now and again, but that’s the thing of it, is you can fix ‘em. Simple enough to do, with the right parts, hell, even the wrong parts, most of the time. You can keep a machine limping along a mighty long time if you’ve a mind to. 

It’s just past Winter, middle of March, and still cold, and he wants to think, shoulder-deep in the innards of a generator, he wants to think it means she misses him. He wants to think that, but doesn’t. Can’t. He claws at the guts of his machine with an old wrench, periodically straightening with thick, ichorous grease smeared along his arms, streaked into the hair at his temples when he wipes away the sweat. Used to be, you could tell the future that way, but Mr. Hades, he never had the knack. Had a nephew, a cousin who did, though. It’s a fine ritual, as they go, excepting the smell. Keeps his head low, Mr. Hades, bent over the coal and the glittering viscera. Cap only goes so far.

The Boss, he ain’t a young man anymore, but there’s enough meat on the bone still for working, enough blood to grease the wheels, and the machines know where they came from. They remember, or least they know what’s good for them, and generator’s engine flips over suddenly, obediently, purring like tiger and setting the wires humming again. Doesn’t smile, he almost never does, but he thumps it on its side all the same. Tried, didn’t he? Didn’t he try? Can’t bring down the birds, so he set the wires singing instead. Can’t bring down the sun, or the stars, so he lit the place all up in as many colours as a man can think of, and then one or two more, just for good measure.

The things a man’ll do for love.

The things a man’ll do, like love, love is what you do to somebody when you just can’t  _ stand _ them anymore, when you’ve plumb run out of ways to settle the score, when you really,  _ really _ wanna hurt somebody, you love them. You never stop loving them. 

Always was pale, Mr. Hades. Had two brothers, and the both of ‘em brown as anything, and darker than that in the sun, but colour never seemed to take to him; bone white, since boyhood. Quartz and chromium. Gold, now, in the hot light of the foundry, gold and red, and hell, what’s a man need a garden for? Colour enough down here, if anybody’d bother to look. He straightens, streaked with soot and firelight and Mr. Hades, he lays bricks and guts open the rock and carves out the knife claims and the galena and the coal with the rest, Mr. Hades throws his head back (but only so far back) and drinks with the boys, white throat shaded black, harsh and heron-like, as he swallows, and he does this, invisible, until his arms shake. Mr. Hades, he takes names. Shakes hands.

Does the whole routine without the cap, too, sometimes, when needs must call for a little glad-handing, a little velvet glove.

Mr. Hades, he’s slick about it, and so nobody sees him slip into the foreman’s office. The windows are frosted over, always, hoary with a thick rime you can see out of, but not into, and so nobody sees Mr. Hades swap the rag vest for a fine black coat, glossy and thick like everything a man’s ever had a cause to regret, and skin out of the dusty work boots, and slip his fine silver watch on its fine platinum chain back into his pocket. Was a wedding present, of a kind.

The cap goes back into a safe, locked up with a picture and a pitted, rust-red key, and what’s left of his cold, black heart.

Can’t even call it Spring, really. 

Still too cold.

 

* * *

 

**June 14.**

Dead can’t lie, is the thing.

A dead man is an empty claim, worked over and stripped bare, tools still lying where they fell, and the stream all dried up. Like a scar. And Mr. Hades, he’s seen a fair few souls stripped bare like that, no flash left in the pan, nowhere to hide, and sure, it teaches a body how to drive a hard bargain, sure enough, but it can’t teach a man how to lie, and a man gets to thinking that people, for the most part, don’t really know what they want.

They want somebody else to know what they want, and tell it to ‘em, so they won’t have to work it out on their own, and mostly people think they want a kindness done to ‘em, but it’s good for a man to be held to account, and mostly they know that, too, and the Boss is always the worst asshole you ever met ‘til you get a new one. The main of it is, Mr. Hades, he just don’t have it in him to lie. Just never learned how. Just a big man who came up a little too quick to know how to carry it right, a little too grim for the not-knowing to come off charming, a little too slow to recognize when one’s conversational partner was not overmuch interested in the extollation of the many fine qualities of plagioclase feldspars.

That’s how he knows, Mr. Hades, he knows that when he tells himself that from day one, day  _ one, _ before they even had days, or nights, or ones, his charge was always to  _ keep _ , nothing into Hadestown that don’t belong in Hadestown, and nothing out,  _ nothing _ out, he knows, when he tells himself that a man can’t help how he was made, so it ain’t none of it his fault, he knows: that’s a lie. Mr. Hades, he has more than once mislead, and on occasion prevaricated, but he don’t lie.

It ain’t in him. 

And so being as he is, Mr. Hades, in the back of his ledger, has an account of himself, by which, he, the undersigned, Hades, receiver of many, of the cypress and the key and the bone pit, to whom all return, the giver of counsel and the passing of the sentence, does so note:

  * That once, she was off on a tear about his brother, who walked out on his wife again, and she looked like a stiff drink, like firelight through good whiskey, and he always did like a drink, when he was of a mind to indulge a bad habit (as so noted under ‘losses’, sub-section 4) and she said, “I don’t even know what I’d do to somebody who did that to me,” but she looked very pointedly south of his belt buckle when she said it, and he, Hades, who is called sometimes he-who-is-shorn, scraped his heavy hand through the crop at the back of his neck, with the soapstone clinking against the side of his glass, and he said “Well, I hope you’d keep it. A man does like to imagine he’s left an impression”, and maybe he _was_ trying to play up the low, tectonic rumble he’d only just grown into, but damn if it didn’t make her laugh. And that was probably the best thing he ever did.
  * That, on the other hand, he’s got a mean streak a mile deep, has worked that seam like a lover, dug the knife-claim out of the rock of himself until he’s picked out every glint of a grudge, which are the colour of opals, and holds them dearer to him than his dogs, which he spoils. She spoils ‘em worse, though. Hades, whose aspect is the serpent and the sceptre and the Ophiolite sequence, spends six damn months chasing the goddamn dogs off the bed. They whine when she leaves, and he shakes them by the jowls to hush them, and they snap at his fingers, but neither one has any real heat in it, which is on account of he is also a cold man. That Hades, of the black crepe armband, he-who -conducts the soul and the alternating current, once locked himself in his office the whole time she was there, in the service of rearing a grudge up right, steeled himself like iron and spiked himself to the rail just to hurt her.
  * As noted under a column which he can’t decide is an asset or a loss, being as a hit dog’ll holler, and a hurt one’ll go to ground, there is a hangdog, lonely loyalty that jumps out of him, sometimes, and spends the hound-days of summer waiting patiently, and that’s mostly calcified over these days, which anyone’ll tell you, that shit’ll seep into the groundwater, and poison the whole well. Whole business goes acid on you. He of the charnel and the anorthosite minerals, hereafter referred to, for the purposes of the business, “Hades,” being as he is honest, does so attest that he does not have any notion of what to make of that.



 

* * *

 

**September 22.**

She steals the good liquor out of his office.

Mr. Hades, his wife steals the good hooch, and also assorted personal effects, and once, which he thinks he may never forgive her for, his heart.

And what the Boss don’t know, the Boss won’t mind, but there is precious little Mr. Hades does not know, and there’s always a body or twelve who will imagine that the snitching could be worth it, always somebody who’ll cross that picket line without realizing that there are certain privileges afforded when you’re fucking the Boss, even though she hasn't, not in a dog’s age, but Mr. Hades, he will stand upon the principle of it. He will offer the husbandly courtesy of a blind eye.

(It  _ is _ a courtesy. Won’t even drag it up in an argument later, honest.)

He does not purport himself to be an especially handsome man, Mr. Hades, but he will allow that maybe once, a dog’s age ago, his wife mighta thought so. In any case, he keeps his whiskers squared up clean as you please, shaves every morning with a pearl-handled razor. Mr. Hades, his wife likes pearls. He himself does not; they remind him too much of the awful wetwork of being alive, the slimy complication of it. Pearl’s just bile you cough up to hide a sore spot, but his wife, she does have a fondness. For sore spots, as well, and Lord, if she don’t have all of his memorized.

He strops the razor back and forth in the steaming air, and it’s September, everything going to garnet, and it’s also not his bathroom he’s standing in.

The sink basin is a lump of tourmaline the size of a man’s chest, and the mirror’s at the wrong height, a shape and shade which Mr. Hades, though he built, could not name, which is to say that it’s a gold-copper alloy, which is to say rose gold, and that Mr. Hades would not know a rose from a ranunculus if it bit him on the ass.  And on account of all that, Mr. Hades is bent nearly double over the whole business, craning the soft, ashy underside of his throat up at odd angles, to try and catch it’s reflection, and consequently rattling his shirt buttons on the stone, being as Mr. Hades is in the habit of shaving with his shirt open like a shroud around him and a damp rag around his neck. It drips into his coffee, long since abandoned.

Mr Hades takes his coffee black, like coal, whereas his wife used to take hers black, like loam, and she used to slip her arms around his waist while he shaved, which is how Mr. Hades started to leave the shirt open, and while his wife has not done so in a dog’s age, the habit is fossilized around him now. He scrapes away at his cheeks with his pearl-handled razor, and cold coffee sloshing on the back of the sink. Mr Hades, for the main, has never been accounted an especially handsome man, but he will allow that a dog’s age ago, his wife mighta thought so. Must’ve. The allowance smoulders in the pit of his stomach like a banked forge. And any man in a mood like that, all shivery and jumpy like a winter wind, surely, also would nick himself right under the hinge of his jaw, and stand there for a spell while the blood pools at his collarbone. Being as Mr. Hades is still a man, and still bleeds. Red poppies on a white field.

The sink is a lump of tourmaline near the size of a grown man’s chest, and the tub is all marble and olivine and big enough to drown in, the kind of absurd extravagance that Mr. Hades’ wife had assured him her mother would  _ despise _ as showy and impractical, and which, consequently, Mr. Hades had procured for her immediately upon the occasion of their marriage. The stone is cool under his thighs when Mr. Hades sinks down to sit in the space on the edge of it, razor loose in his hand, bleeding. A dog’s age ago, used to be there was a ritual by which a man, covered in coal dust and ruby grime, might linger in the doorway of such a room, with a such a tub in it, and that man’s wife would look back over her soapy shoulder, and would then say to him “Are you gonna stand there all day staring, or are you gonna make yourself useful?”, and the man, caked in salt and sapphires and oil, would say back “You don’t want me in there like this,” and gesture then to his filthy arms, and his wife would say “It’s a  _ bath _ , that’s what they’re  _ for _ ”, and “Lover, are you  _ really _ gonna let me hurt my back leaning on all this hard rock?”, and so chip away at his resolve until he relented to crawl in with her, and wash her hair. 

Pull the plug on it. Takes a toll on man, already jittery on account of it being September, and also on account of several more coffees with a few more slugs of whiskey in them than might be considered wise, and Mr. Hades, taker-of-tolls, arrives topside that year looking very fine indeed, and exactly, perfectly on time.

 

* * *

 

 

**Septemeber 23.**

On the road to Hell, there’s a railroad car, and it has a drinks cart and everything. A whole bar, done up in dark wood and silver. Very fine.

“So,” rumbles Mr. Hades, and he polishes his dark glasses with a handkerchief for a good while, as though it might make things any more obvious.

“So,” says Persephone, drumming on her suitcase like she’s trying to be kind, but can’t quite remember what they used to talk about when they weren’t fighting. It  _ clinks _ faintly when the car sways.

Mr Hades, he opens his mouth. Closes it. An engine misfiring, while she stares out the window at the red leaves, and he works the knife-claim of courage up out of the rock of himself, dredges up the will to stand, and knock on the windowpane, and do it softly, and Mr. Hades raises his eyebrows almost sheepishly and says “Fix you a drink?”

She looks at him, mouth blood-bright like the leaves, and sucks her teeth.  _ Loud _ . 

“Yes,” she sighs, working her jaw back and forth, and then after a moment, “Please.”

In deference to his lady wife’s particularites, Mr. Hades procures from the bar a bottle, whose contents are as dry and as clear as the surface of the moon, silver fresh from the mint, and just as legal as murder. You could strip paint with that shit.

They drink awhile in silence. 

The train rumbles and sways, and Mr. Hades, he rumbles and sways with it, because Lord help him if the machine sounds aren’t still a comfort. A man will hew to his comforts. 

A man will tuck away his dark glasses, and stretch out his legs, because hell if the ride ain’t long, and that man’s wife will kick him in the ankle for sticking his leg out too far and scuffing her suitcase with his glossy beetle-black shoes. Some things don’t change. 

But she says nothing, just gives him a familiar glare as he draws his leg back, so Mr. Hades, being a man of business, and savouring, as he does, the comfort of an old hurt, straightens slowly, and begins to arrange his papers around himself. Mr. Hades, he skins out of his overcoat and draws his ledger from the void of his lapels, and likewise his pen, and 

Stops.

Mr. Hades, being as he has never been blessed with Foresight, nor blessed with an especial degree of sight at all, even as a younger man, truth be told, leastways not in the topside light, raises his ledger up at arm’s length. He calibrates. The light catches on his wedding band.

Persephone, the hive and hymn, the ways and the means, and the terms and conditions, snorts into her moonshine.

“You forgot them, didn’t you? The  _ good _ ones. How many times do I remind you, and you never remember that those goddamn smoked-up coke bottles don’t help you.”

He looks up from within the intricate strata of paperwork to stare, and the old, busted up, broke-down, hangdog fondness slips the leash and goes running out to meet her, tail wagging.

She looks. Considers.

“Shove over,” murmurs Persephone, “I can’t stand watching everything go by me backwards, gives me headaches.”

And Persephone, she plants herself right in the middle of all of it, without hardly waiting for the completion of the geologic processes of Mr. Hades’ filing, and she sits, upright as the winter wheat at his left hip. And he shoots her an aggrieved look, almost entirely toothless. The train rumbles and sways, and three, four, near to twenty-odd times, it throws her into him, while she’s staring past him, watching the hills roll by, and Mr. Hades, at some length, having loosened his collar without any recollection that he decided to do, shifts by increments to present her with the sleek, moleskin black of his breast pocket.

Mr. Hades raises his eyebrows. “Might be easier on your neck,” he ventures.

“This doesn’t fix things,” she mutters, sinking into his side with a weighty, glacial slowness.

“I know.”

“And we are going to have a  _ talk _ , you and me, when I get off this train,” she warns, slipping off her heels and tucking her feet up under her.

“I know.”

“And you don’t know everything!” she huffs, elbowing him in the ribs, and her hair is so, so soft under his chin.

“I know.”

Mr. Hades, he laughs, chuckles low in his chest, like an earthquake moving freight. 

“Move your arm,” she mutters into his neck. “I’m not having your elbow in my hip this whole time.”

Comes over him like a landslide, it does, like he cannot help but throw his arm around her like he must’ve never forgotten the shape of her, but its starts slow, like landslide does, almost invisible, until she shoves her hip against his and she says “Are you gonna leave that hanging up there all day, or you gonna make yourself useful?”, and then everything comes down like a mineshaft collapsing.

Rumble and sway.

Deepest sleep Mr. Hades has known in a dog’s age, truth be told.

On the road to Hell, there’s a railroad car, and a man’ll knock before opening, if he’s any sense to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](https://thefaustaesthetic.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/gin_n_chthonic) for additional pseudo-folk aphorisms, and Hadestown memes.


End file.
